On 12/9/05, Martin Cooper <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On 12/9/05, Frank W. Zammetti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > My turn to date myself, along with Frank. ;-)
Me too :-). In my first programming job, I wrote my code on coding sheets. When I was > done, those would go to a data entry group, who would type the code on to > punched cards. Then the cards would go to the sysops, who would schedule > the > job. When the job completed, usually the next day, I would get a pile of > paper back. That edit /compile cycle alone taught me to be very, very > careful and deliberate when I write my code. I was pretty much in the same place in my first for-pay programming job (at the university I was attending). Indeed, our whole data center (including the programming classes) was punched card based, and only ran student jobs 2-3 times a day. So, when I was taking my programming classes, and before I even got the full time programming job, I cleverly got myself hired as the operator that *ran* the student jobs ... so I could run *my* jobs as many times as I needed to :-). I'm sort of a recent (well, last three years) convert away from Emacs and towards IDEs. My original motivations/excuses centered around the fact that I wanted to never touch a mouse, and even avoid function keys if I could, to maximize typing speed. Nowdays, my fingers have slowed down enough that I can appreciate all the other things IDEs can do for me. In particular, my sweet spots (when building Java class libraries for frameworks) are: * Debugging (I usually consider it an admission of defeat when I can't find bugs by visual inspection, but when you need this you need it BADLY) * Refactoring (unlike a lot of open source projects, at work we distinguish clearly between public and private APIs, and have a lot of freedom to improve the code organization of existing private modules -- very handy). * Pushbutton unit tests (in NetBeans, I press ALT+F6 to compile my project and then execute the unit tests all the time, pretty much to the exclusion of just running the "Build Project" target). * Code completion (lets me feel better about using longer more descriptive method and class names) * Version control integration (although I wish the SVN plugins were a little more mature ...) Yes, I can go find Emacs plugins that can do all of that, but then I have to remember all the crazy ALT/META/SHIFT keystroke combinations. Craig
